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Importance of clocking

There is a lot of talk that external clocks because of the distance to the processor don‘t work. This is the opposite of my experience. While I had used an external Antelope rubidium clock,on my Etherregen and Zodiac Platinum Dac, I have now added a Lhy Audio UIP clocked by the same Antelope Clock to reclock the USB stream emanating from the InnuOS Zenith MkIII. The resultant increase in soundstage depth, attack an decay and overall transparency isn‘t subtle. While there seems to be lots of focus on cables, accurate clocking throughout the chain seems still deemed unnecessary. I don‘t understand InnuOS‘ selling separate reclockers for USB and Ethernet without synchronising Ethernet input, DAC conversion and USB output.

antigrunge2

Showing 1 response by andy2

andy2
1,555 posts
 

It is helpful to clarify whether the application is using s/pdif or asynchronous USB.

For s/pdif, I think DCS uses what they call "reverse clocking" to minimize jitter in this case an external clock makes sense.  The clock comes from the DAC domain and is used to clock out the transport data.  In this case it is mostly mimic what you  have to the asynchronous USB.

For asynchronous USB the data clocking comes from the DAC domain so an external clock may not help much.  For this, you probably want to have the clock physically as close to the DAC as possible which is the implementation of most USB DAC anyway.

But there is a but.  In asynchronous USB, if the incoming data has a lot of noise, it may inject that noise into the DAC circuit, so you could argue buffering the data with a reclocker will clean up the noise and therefore improving the sound quality.

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